Late on his last day as a DEA agent, Joe Rannazzisi grabbed a mailroom cart to wheel a few boxes of personal belongings to his Ford Excursion. He had turned in his badge earlier that day — one without a formal goodbye lunch that was now an evening without farewell drinks. Almost everyone had already cleared out of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s sleek office complex in Arlington, and the silent corridor was a numbing coda to a career that for all its accolades seemed to have ended in defeat.
It was an unusual feeling for the muscled, tough-talking New Yorker who’d spent 30 years bringing down bad guys.
As head of the DEA’s division for policing the drug industry, Rannazzisi and his agents had pursued corrupt doctors and the nation’s largest drug manufacturers, distribution companies, and pharmacy chains that were pouring powerful and highly addictive opioids into communities across the country.
His agents had successfully raided the warehouses of Fortune 500 companies. The DEA fined them tens of millions of dollars. Some of the companies were household names, such as Walgreens and CVS. Others had escaped public scrutiny, but he saw them as equally or even more culpable, companies such as Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, Cardinal Health, Teva Pharmaceuticals, McKesson Corporation, and AmerisourceBergen Corp.
